Opinion: Public EV charging in the UK raises new questions for Australia

For reasons you won’t need a vivid imagination to work out, I have left Australia for a while and find myself tapping away not at my kitchen bench in Melbourne looking out at a stalled nation in grim stasis, but in the UK.

It’s been years since I found myself on this isle, yet it hasn’t taken long to remember the frustrating things that were instrumental in my departure. However, the stuff England does so very well has also come to mind.

On the motorway, for example, drivers stay in the left lane unless overtaking – a concept so fabulously complex, it seems, that you rarely ever see it in practice in Australia. On the contrary, no matter how many lanes you have to choose from Down Under, traffic will be evenly distributed across all of them and dawdling along at 10km/h less than the speed limit.

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The minutely tolerant part of my personality almost understands the desire to stay away from the speed limit with every police officer poised in bushes and wheelie bins waiting to pounce on drivers who break the limit by a few percent.

Perplexingly though, I have been blasting around the UK in a 2021 Audi S3 at 80mph (16km/h over the maximum permitted speed) and not once has a law enforcement officer paid me the slightest attention.

Even more amazingly, despite approximately half of the motorway traffic cruising at the same law-flouting speed, I have witnessed neither one massive fiery pileup nor any vigilante road-users shaking their fists and flashing their lights.

It’s the same at lower speeds, too. Pull over and allow oncoming traffic to pass in tight spots and an English driver will raise a hand in thanks, often accompanied by a smile. In any of Australia’s metropolises though, the most you can expect in return for the favour is a despondent glance away and entitled ignorance.

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Car culture in England is very different but it certainly isn’t perfect. Fuel prices, for example, are monumental and influence the national car park. I initially thought the abounding sub-compact car numbers and diesel-engine prevalence was weird and, since I arrived, I’ve counted two Ford Mustangs. But then I pulled in to fill up the Audi and was basically mugged at the counter for three dollars per litre. That’s about $130 for a hatch.

However, something else has come to light that I find even more shocking. While we often use other nations, including the UK, as examples of how electric cars can and do work, spending time here reveals an uncomfortable truth that’s quite the opposite. While EVs are more affordable, Britain is nowhere near providing the adequate infrastructure to enable easy running.

If you only ever drive within the range of your EV and can charge at home, electric cars make sense in the UK, just as they do in Australia. However, embark on a road trip and it becomes clear the public infrastructure is under-gunned.

Chargers in London are effectively rendered useless by queues of black cabs, with all the capital’s iconic taxis on track to be electric by 2023. And with the number of EVs skyrocketing on UK roads, public charging stations are frequently occupied. Instead of the attractive 30-minute charge times advertised by many, the actual time is multiplied by the number of owners you queue behind.

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Many users report problematic charging applications, unreliable information regarding charger locations and many units out of order. Even when you can finally get the plug in, electricity is expensive compared with dinosaur juice.

The fastest public fill can cost up to the equivalent of $65. However, as most EVs have a range of roughly half the equivalent petrol or diesel it effectively means they are around twice as expensive to refuel at a public charger. With a staggering number of UK homes lacking garage or even driveway parking, the problem is very real.

One Porsche Taycan owner I noticed in Bath had routed a cable from their house, under the pavement and out of a service hatch via a makeshift repurposed plastic speed bump. It looked about as legal as cockfighting but this is a good illustration of the problem.

It pains me to report this because not only are electric cars fundamentally brilliant, they are also inevitable. And as long as relatively EV-friendly countries like the UK continue to struggle, Australia will remain even further behind the world with an even bigger mountain to climb.